PRICE

Everyone knew the real price of essence wasn't gold or favors.

It was you.

He had heard a story once. A Warden, a powerful one who retired after having a child. Essence made her into something different, something alien, though no one saw it at the time. When she was a Warden, she had an outlet for the raw, unfiltered wrongness inside her. But once she left that behind, it festered. It grew and twisted further and further. She stopped seeing people as people. They were just amorphous shapes, faceless and shifting, lurking in the dark out to get her.

One night, she woke up from a nightmare, her mind still tangled in whatever horrors she had experienced. She saw a monster in her bed. And she killed it. When her senses cleared, she found her husband's body beside her. Their child broken on the floor.

Even after hearing all that, Pavel never wavered. He had long since resolved to sell all of himself if it meant clawing his way out.

So he partook in communion.

For three days, he sat alone in a dark room, the essence cupped so gently in his hands as if he breathed wrong, it would disappear. Its energy rang through his fingertips like a second heartbeat. He imagined it sinking into his veins, his chest, pooling around his ribs and into his heart. With each breath, he forged what allowed him to become a Harbinger, a psuedo-core, a place of power.

When he emerged, he was hungry and parched, barely alive and delirious, his mind stretched so thin he thought it would snap, but he had won. He was a Harbinger. Touched by the power of the Great Old Ones.

And so he used it. He shattered bones, he healed his injuries, he fought in the pits and won. Again and again, he won. He climbed, clawing up the pit one brutal victory at a time, until the slums he felt as if the slums no longer held him.

But as the months passed, he realized the horrid truth. The wins piled up, but nothing else did. He had no dreams beyond the next fight. No future beyond the next opponent and the next win. He had given up his future to become what he already was. A fighting dog.

Just another Volkov enforcer, another hired fist.

So he leaned into it. He had nothing else to be, so he became the role completely. He was a champion. A fighter. The man who always won. Undefeated.

If he wasn't the winner, then what was left?

And in that moment of emptiness, the essence answered for him.

It broke from the core that he had forged, it shot through his body, twisting his mind as it went and made him into something else. Bones snapped, skin rippled, and he grew. He changed as the space around him warped and quivered, the very world breaking under the new reality.

He was no longer the champion. He was no longer Pavel. No longer a man at all.

He had become an essence beast.

THE JACKAL

Bellamy felt the change before he saw it. The thing tore at his scaffolding, threatening to rip it piece by piece into the wind. He barely managed to coat himself in essence, just in time to avoid being turned into a fine red mist. The air around him remained still, with no impact or strike --just the sound of a howl-- but his essence screamed at him. Shouting that he had come within a hair's breadth of annihilation. He turned – his gut already twisting with certainty– to face that which all Harbingers feared, unraveling. Becoming an essence beast.

Before him stood a massive, broken dog. Its jaw was shattered into four flailing flaps, more a blooming wound than mouth or maw.

The creature had more skin than fur, with patches of human hair sprouting in uneven tufts across its body. The spine stretched far too long for its sagging skin to contain, curving and twisting just underneath as if trying to claw its way free from the beast's back. Hunched low, slobber dribbling from its mouth, the jackal let out a hiccuping human cackle.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Pandemonium erupted from the audience as people surged towards the exit, only to be met with barred doors. The first to arrive pounded them with heavy fists, voices raw as they screamed at the guards to open up. The second wave crashed into the first. Then the third. Then the fourth and fifth. They pressed together, a writhing mass of bodies until the first wave crushed against the thick wooden slabs, their screams drowned beneath the wet snap of breaking bones.

A gunshot rang out, muffled, whipping the crowd into a greater frenzy. Bellamy spared a look up to where Viracio was sitting. He held a gun in his hand – where had he gotten a gun? – Penny's brains were splattered against the glass. A few more shots rang out as the rat turned to the other guards, but Bellamy had no longer time to focus on him. He threw himself to the side as the dog lunged. It catapulted across the arena, covering the distance as fast as a full-speed freight train. The foundation of the building shook, dislodging portions of stone and dirt, both raining down throughout the basement. Dust billowed up, swallowing the beast in a swirl of fog. Bellamy went low, muscles coiling, waiting for the first flicker of movement. He had to see. He had to–

MOVE.

His essence screamed at him as another ripple of power slammed against his defenses. He began a roll to the side, but stopped, eyes locked onto the smoke as his eyes widened. He scrambled to stop his momentum, barely succeeding as the creature pounced at where he would've been.

It baited him. It baited him like a pitfighter would. Bellamy's breath caught – then spilled into a string of curses. The thing was intelligent.

The essence beast wasn't even fully transformed. If it had been, the beast would have no mind for tactics or complex thought processes; it would simply rampage, essence leaking out as it constantly used its ability before eventually imploding.

The thought sent a chill up his spine as the beast let out another choking laugh. It began to circle. Bellamy responded in kind.

He sent out his own pulse of essence, gauging the substance's ambience in the air. The essence. The jackal wasn't leaking. The creature was stable. It wouldn't just disappear. It would stay like a Titan would. Hell. Did this count as being a Titan? He didn't know. He understood the theory, it was drilled into him in that cold iron room, but this wasn't covered. This was new. It had to be.

He had to think. He couldn't let his mind wander. Pavel could move impacts. The dogs should be the same. Was his ability still a bust? Using it directly on the creature might be more dangerous now even.

It didn't have the musculature to move around as fast as it did. It had to be using Pavel's ability to do that somehow.

The beast was done circling. Rushing in, its top and bottom mouth flaps, opening wide to take his arm. Bellamy ducked left. The beast's head snapped after him, maw splitting. The left flap snapped in a tearing motion. It used them independently like one would use fingers, except for these had sharp rotted teeth. It bit with the top and bottom and sawed with the left and right.

Bellamy clenched his fist and sent an uppercut from his lower position to the dog's throat. It impacted with a crunch and sent Bellamy rolling to the right. Disorientation. Shock. He glanced left. Nothing. But something had still struck.

The beast had done it. Turned his own strike against him.

He turned the impact into a roll and angled it forward, hoping to get underneath the creature while he recovered. He scrambled to his feet, but the beast was already matching him, its gnashing, alternating jaws testing his defenses.

It couldn't have seen the impact. Could it have? Pavel had to focus to use the ability. Was the creature better at it? Did it feel the hit coming?

He shot forward, sliding under a nip. Flat on his back he planted his hands over his head and brought his feet over his hips. He pushed, stopping the upward kick an inch away from the creature's belly, letting the air pressure and current hit the beast before extending his foot for a kick. It impacted him in the ribs.

The creature howled in glee. Its ability was always active now, a constant part of itself.

Twisting its body, it raised a hind leg and slammed it into Bellamy's chest. The floor shattered, spider webbing cracks across the arena. The essence coating his body took the majority of the impact, and even still, he could feel several of his ribs break. He grit his teeth, sending more and more essence through his body as the bones knit themselves back together. But the monster kept increasing the pressure, kept putting more and more weight on that one leg as it twisted its head down to look at him in glee.

Bellamy reached for his manifestation, for the core in his chest, pulling energy from it as he prepared–.

A whistle, sharp and unnatural, split the air like a blade dragged across glass. The dog's body spasmed, and for the first time, it let out a low growl. The sound caught and broke against its throat – deep and guttural – like an engine choking on its own fuel.

It yipped and bit at thin air before snarling and hurtling itself forward. Away from Bellamy and towards the mob of people still at the door. Bellamy felt the essence growing around it. Felt the rolling of essence and power as when he escaped turning into red mist.

In three bounds, the beast reached the edge of the arena and howled. The vibrations traveled through the edge of the crowd, and one by one, the pile of bodies began to shake in tandem. Like a deep drumming base stuck in their chest, it roiled inside them, spreading from fingertips to toes. Screams erupted -- and, in an instant -- red shattered the entrance, spraying the viscera of sixty individuals across the wall and into the air. There were no scraps of skin, no body parts in the air, no eyes resting on nearby seating, just a dull mix of red and brown. One moment, a crowd; the next, nothing.

Quiet settled over the arena. For another second, the only noise was the buzz of light bulbs, and Bellamy finally understood the manifestation. The ability at its core. Not Pavel's understanding of it, and not how he used it, but the actual manifestation.

Not impact redirection.

Force manipulation.

And if the user could focus enough, if they could expand their thoughts and think in complex ways combined with an instinctual understanding of the world.

Then, it could manipulate the forces of atoms that held people together. The only reason he wasn't pasted was because he coated himself in essence. Large impacts would only be dulled when he did so, but an infinite amount of tiny forces would become non-existent. But those who had no essence, who couldn't cover and protect themselves in it, would die instantaneously.

The thing. It wasn't a beast anymore. The jackal at the door was walking death.